Happy Birthday today to Margaret Logan Gregory (Feb. 7, 1766), my 2nd great-grandmother, and to her son George Washington Gregory (Feb. 7, 1808), my great-grand uncle.

Margaret’s husband and GW’s father, Godfrey Gregory, claimed to own the human beings in the 1850 Kentucky census below. They have no names, of course.

By extension, and in Black History Month, Happy Birthday to these unnamed people. If there’s even the slightest chance that the slightest amount of their blood flows in my veins, I’d be proud beyond imagination.

They Gregorys are all buried in a family cemetery in Washington County, Kentucky.

When Elizabeth and I visited Stratford-on-Avon, we noticed that the churchyard is bounded by a fence made up of black granite tombstones from which time has erased the names.

There’s a good chance that the Gregory family cemetery and its tombstones’ names have vanished, too. History has a way of getting even.

I think that we leave behind is intangible. Godfrey’s grandson was my grandfather, the Kentucky-born John Smith Gregory, the man in the chair in front of his farmhouse.

What Mr. Gregory left behind was a legacy of kindness, service to others and the indelible reputation as the most graceful waltzer in Texas County, Missouri. Maybe the most graceful waltzer on the Ozark Plateau. He made the teenaged girls who shyly lined up for his dance card believe that a sawdust-strewn barn floor was made of polished glass.

So there is, indeed, is slightest chance that my grandfather and I share a common ancestor—one I might meet someday meet–who had his or her origins in Africa, not in Lowland Scotland or the English Midlands.

I read a rant on Facebook on Critical Race Theory, which is not taught in any California high school, despite the ranter’s insistence that it is. Willful ignorance seems to be seductive nowadays. It was in 1861, too. My namesake from another branch of the family, Confederate officer James McBride, led his Confederate into battle under this flag. They knew what they were about: States’ Rights, the defense and extension of slavery, and Jesus Christ.

I am fond of the Bogart line from Casablanca, when Rick informs Major Strasser that he came to Casablanca for the waters. “I was misinformed,” Rick says.

I do know this: I took a year of the History of the American South in college and, I, the namesake of two Confederates, was entranced. That led to me teaching Black History to my high-schoolers for thirty years.

So they learned about Harriet Tubman and Maya Angelou, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong (they instinctively loved Armtrong), osh Gibson and Satchel Paige,  Brown v. Board and Loving v. Virginia.

They were entranced. Learning this history made my kids proud to be Americans.

Immensely proud, you might say.

Black history’s part of their history, after all:

–The ferocity of the assault of Black soldiers on the Confederate center as Nashville in 1864 guaranteed the success of an the Ohio regiment’s assault on the Confederate left a few hours later. That’s where Arroyo Grande farmer Otis Smith earned his Medal of Honor.

–Huasna Valley rancher Adam Bair, a Mankins ancestor, watched the Black troops descend into the Crater outside Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864, where they were slaughtered like sheep. That’s because they knew what they were doing and should have gone in first, instead of the White troops who preceded them, chosen because they were White.

–The all-Black 54^th Coast Artillery had barracks in Shell Beach. The audience demanded three encores when a 54^th octet sang spirituals at a 1943 Christmas concert at the Army Rec Camp in Monarch Grove in Pismo Beach. Sometimes those GI’s played baseball against the AGUHS Varsity.

My students, nearly all White or Latino, loved learning about these Americans.

During World War II, “these Americans” were not allowed within the Arroyo Grande city limits after sundown. Black History month means learning the painful parts, too. Learning them only makes us stronger.

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American singer Melanie, born Melanie Safka-Schekeryk in Queens of Ukrainian and Italian parents, died Tuesday at 76. If you have no idea who she is, let me introduce you to her at twenty-three, performing with the Edwin Hawkins singers on a Dutch TV show. While the audience, more than half over sixty, looks as if it were lifted from a Monty Python sketch, they eventually come around.

So I will miss her terribly, and so will, among many, Keith Richards and Miley Cyrus, with whom she sang. She might well be singing with Johnny Cash right now; the two performed “Silver Threads and Golden Needles” together.

And if you have no idea who the Edwin Hawkins singers are, let me give you a wee hint from Sister Act 2. The young soloist is Ryan Toby.

But it was the choir backing Melanie, the Edwin Hawkins singers, who first released this song in 1967. Here they are. The lead singer is Dorothy Combs Thompson.

And, of course, there is no way anyone could stop Aretha Franklin from covering this marvelous hymn. When she did, it was with the legendary Mavis Staples. Someone put together this video, intercut with Aretha (call) and the wonderful images of the congregants (response). 

Melanie grew up in Queens, Dorothy in Texas, and Aretha is singing in the church where her father was pastor, in Detroit. We are in troubled times now, and perhaps music is one way we can navigate them. American music is so rich and so varied, but, after all, e pluribus unum–“In many, one.” Melanie’s song reminded me of that.

If you thought that something prurient was going to follow, you are wrong. Got your attention, though, right? And we shall return to Evelyn in just a moment. And yes, she was lovely, That was the problem.

I used to show, in my AP European History class, several episodes of The Day the Universe Changed, from the 1980s, narrated by English science historian James Burke, and this is why: He thinks like me. I am nowhere near that bright, but a typical episode of Day would take the viewer inside a French teaching hospital and then to Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin more or less invented hospitals, then to London laid low by cholera (the Thames stank so badly that Parliament’s window shades were soaked in lime chloride and then lowered), then to William Farr and the invention of London’s system of intercepting sewers and then to the Victorian mania for clean water (European spas) and for Victorian manly sport at British public schools and then you were back at the French hospital. He then tied the package. All these disparate events were connected. In fact, Burke who, thank God, is still with us, had an earlier show with that precise name: Connections.

Burke would stop only occasionally, to make himself a cuppa tea.

I think I enjoyed him so much because I recognized a kindred mind. And, mind, I am NOT saying that I’m as smart as James Burke. What I’m saying instead is that I think like him. I am not and never have been a linear thinker, moving from point A to point Z while shattering all the letters in between to finish my quest. Nossir. Nossirreebob.

I think laterally: I start with point A and that reminds me of something that happened to point Q—oh, and do you know that points Q and D are first cousins? and then to point R, because R was D’s tutor when she was a little girl. Eventually, we get to point Z and (most of the time) we finish our quest. But, if my mind were a Greyhound bus, it’d be a local, not an express. There are too many stops to make and things to see before I get to my destination.

Or, to put it another way, if my mind were a street, it’d be Lombard in San Francisco.

Allow me to use an example. Ahem:

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Yesterday I read a friend’s post that cited the West Los Angeles Veterans’ Hospital. I remembered that it was once called the Sawtelle (after the boulevard) Veterans’ Home. Two of Arroyo Grande’s Civil War veterans, Medal of Honor awardee Otis Smith and Morris Denham, whose home still stands on Ide Street, were patients there–as were many other South County veterans–but they were called “inmates,” which gives you an idea of how they were treated. “Prunes, toast and tea,” one of them sighed. “I know exactly what they’ll give us for dinner.”

But Sawtelle looked beautiful because it was designed by the superb American architect Stanford White.

Superb American architect Stanford White was a creep.

He did what we might call a “Bill Cosby” on up-and-coming model and showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. That is, he drugged and raped her. He was 48. She was sixteen. She would go on the become the archetypal “Gibson Girl.” White would go on to become richer and famouser. And deader.

Nesbit later married the mercurial Harry Thaw. Both Thaw and White were attending a 1906 show at White’s Madison Square Garden. During the song “I Could Love a Million Girls,” Thaw, after bellowing “YOU RUINED MY WIFE!” shot White three times at point-blank range.

White died. Thaw went to prison. Good for them.

Evelyn lived to be 82, by which time I don’t know that she’d learned anything more about men than she’d known when she was sixteen.

And eighteen years after the murder at Madison Square Garden, my grandmother was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention, held inside the Garden in sweltering heat. Unless she had the good luck to find a bathtub full of ice, she would’ve had the chance to hear young Franklin Roosevelt, struck down by paralysis at Campobello, make his comeback by placing Alfred E. Smith’s name in nomination.

Smith didn’t win the nomination that year, but he did in 1928 and ran against Hoover. Smith was Catholic, which produced a bigoted anti-Smith campaign button, and favored repeal of Prohibition, a plank on the 1928 platform that produced the most salacious campaign button in American history. The button didn’t work, of course, Hoover won what turned out to be, thanks to the October 1929 Crash, the booby prize.

So four years earlier my Ozark Plateau grandmother had fought against the nomination of Smith and for the nomination of a compromise nonentity, John W. Davis, a man so conservative that thirty years later, he argued against Brown v. Board before the Supreme Court. He lost in 1924, and to the effervescent Calvin Coolidge, who had stop taking rocking-chair naps on the White House portico because tourists thought he was dead.

Grandma Gregory got her way, after 103 ballots and twelve days—the longest political convention in American history, in the un-air-conditioned Madison Square Garden of Stanford White.

Nominee Davis wrote this thank-you note just before losing the general election. And so the debauchery of government continued, although certainly not on the scale of recent years.

Maybe Grandma Gregory knew about the Stanford White story, but she would have no use for him, anyway. And not because he was immoral*, but because he designed a hospital for Yankees. She never let a week go by, I’d bet, to remind folks that she was the granddaughter of this Confederate general, James H. McBride, for whom I am named.

And so, here we are, right back where we started, at the Civil War.

*However, she was Church of Christ. St. Peter was showing a newcomer around Heaven when he suddenly shushed the lucky arrival. “Why do we need to be quiet?” the newcomer asked. “This is the Church of Christ section,” Peter replied, “and they think they’re the only ones here.”

Jan. 12, 1969: Joe Namath’s New York Jets defeat Johnny Unitas’s Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.

Young people, this was an “8” on the football Richter Scale. AFL teams–the Chiefs and the Raiders–had been humiliated by the NFL’s Green Bay Packers in the first two Super Bowls, in the olden days, before the leagues merged.

Now it was the NFL’s Baltimore Colts’ turn to humiliate the upstart AFL team, the New York Jets.

The Colts were led by Johnny Unitas, so old-school that he still wore high-top cleats (this pair sold for $6,000). If they had a Mr Rushmore (Perish the thought. Leave the Black Hills alone!) for quarterbacks, Johnny U. would be on it.

The Jets were led by a kid who’d played ball at Alabama for Bear Bryant–Forrest Gump’s coach– but had left all that behind for the Bright Lights and Big City. Willie Joe Namath liked New York City, liked to party.

His Jets were 19 1/2 point underdogs.

Namath predicted that they would beat Johnny U and the Colts. Guffaws followed.

But he was right. Final score: Jets 16, Colts 7.

You might think: What about the Jets’ defense? But if you look at the statistics, the two teams are nearly identical in offensive stats, from yards gained to first downs to time of possession.

The stat that stands out to me, admittedly no expert? Average yards gained per pass: Unitas’ was 4.4 yards. Namath’s average was 7.1 yards.

Namath threw the ball like a dart thrower. Shallow windup, violent downswing and–zip!–a spiral that resembled a 30.06 bullet exiting its rifle barrel. (Kenny Stabler and John Elway had similar deliveries.)

He was throwing darts that day.

He was throwing darts on this day in history, on January 12, 1969.

Joe, as was his right, became a superstar. He grew a Fu Manchu mustache and shaved it off for $10,000 for a TV commercial. He posed with Ann-Margaret for a motorcycle flick. (He wasn’t a very good actor.) He had a thing for fur coats. Still does.

Today he’s a grandfather of six and kind of a parody because of those those Social Security spots (those people are sharks, by the way). But I can’t help but look, during those ads, at how his fingers are bent and arthritic and I remember, in his last years, as a Ram, that watching him enter and exit the field was a visual ordeal.

Football had destroyed his body.

But here’s the thing: That cheerful guy you see on those stupid commercials? I think that’s the way he is in real life. He is now a six-times-over grandfather, and my hunch is that he gets down on the floor to play with those kids even though it takes him forever to get back up.

Party animal, sex symbol, TV huckster, all of that’s true. None of it captures him. Throwing darts at Emerson Boozer out of the backfield or playing video games with his grandkids are truer pictures.

Hall of Famer. That might be the truest of all. But his Hall of Fame bust takes second place to this plaque in his hometown, Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, pop. 8,900 in 2023, near oilfields like the ones my mother’s Irish ancestors worked during their time in Pennsylvania in the 1870s.

We had only about ten weeks left, in 1969, after that game, before we lost Mom.

But Super Bowl III was about hope, not loss. Something happened that only happened consistently in Frank Capra movies: the underdogs won.

That must be why I’m a fan.